Food for thought for a brain on a really meager diet

Some food for thought, or for sitting there gazing at nothing in glassy-eyed slack-jawed confusion, while it’s almost still Saint Patrick’s Day in California:

Saint Patrick was not Irish.

Saladin, the great Islamic commander during the Crusades, was not Arabic.

Catherine the Great was not Russian. Neither was Stalin.

Napoleon was not French.

Hitler was not German. Nor was he entirely Aryan.

There are several other people I could add to this list if I could remember them. Later maybe I will.

So what were they?

Saint Patrick was British, Saladin Kurdish, Catherine the Great Prussian, Stalin Georgian, Napoleon Corsican, and Hitler Austrian. Recent DNA analysis of saliva samples from several dozen of Hitler’s relatives tends to confirm long-held suspicions that he had Jewish ancestry.

Of course for years Donald Trump maintained vociferously that Barack Obama was not American, a position he repudiated, without explanation or apology, for reasons of political expediency during his disastrously successful presidential campaign. Being Donald Trump means never having to say you're sorry. Or having to by normal standards of common decency but refusing to. I wish I could tell you that Donald Trump wasn't American, much less our president. One of the many ironies of the great unfolding freak show of which he is at once the main attraction and the guy standing outside the tent with a bullhorn, is that he would very likely not be American if his grandfather Friedrich Trump had not had the huge misfortune to be deported from Bavaria in 1905. Having grown up there and run off at age sixteen to the US and then to the Klondike in Canada, where he made a tidy profit catering to the needs of gold miners, Friedrich later married a fellow Bavarian, Donald's grandmother Elisabeth, and settled with her in New York. But they did not stay settled long. She got homesick, so they moved back to Bavaria. Friedrich sought to reestablish his citizenship there, but his application was denied on the grounds that he had failed to perform compulsory military service and to have his name stricken from the registry in his hometown of Kallstadt. So the Trumps returned to Queens and begat Donald's father, Fred, with whom Donald would systematically decline to rent apartments to black people seventy years or so later. And now, another forty or so years after that, the grandson of a pair of deportees, if he keeps even a small part of one of his main campaign promises, is set to touch off one of history's greatest mass deportations. It's a measure of his humanity that he seems to relish the prospect.